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Thursday, 19 June 2014

Folk Tale Dev Blog 24

Hey guys. Thanks for dropping in for Dev Blog 24. Today we’ll be looking at the recently released Patch 0.2.6, and the new website packed full of useful information.

Patch 0.2.6 is available now on Steam if you want to try it out for yourself. We’ve added a raft of new buildings and professions that are going to make the first playable sandbox content in Patch 0.3 a deeper and more enjoyable experience.

The Hunting Lodge is home to the Hunter profession, ranged bow units that hunt Deer and Boar for raw meat and hides. For the next patch we’re focusing on making the new professions work-enabled. That means the Hunter will go about his daily routine of hunting nearby animals, and take them back to the Lodge for skinning.

In an example of one of the economy chains we’re introducing, once the Hunter has processed the carcass, they’ll pass the meat over to the Butchery. The Butcher’s job is to process the raw meat and make Steaks, Sausages, and Meat Pies for selling on to your villagers at a healthy profit, swelling your coffers, filling their bellies to stave off starvation, and keeping them happy.

The Farmer, Windmill and Wheat Field have been in for a while now, and with the addition of the Bakery we’ll soon be able to complete another economy chain. The Baker mixes flour from the windmill with water from the well, and bakes it into tasty bread. The Baker will also be able to craft luxury items including cakes and toast ( both of which require butter as a crafting ingredient from the Dairy which we’ll be adding later ).

In a previous patch we added the Monastery, Monk and Bee Yard for brewing Barrels of Mead. With the addition of the Tavern and the Innkeeper, tankards will soon be clinking to the sound of merriment as the Mead flows into the gullets of thirsty villagers. The Tavern will also be where you’ll hire heroes for adventuring out into the wilds in the RPG side of Folk Tale, but for now we’re focusing on citybuilding, economy and RTS style combat.

In the latest patch we’ve also added in basic combat. To help testing, we’ve made monsters selectable and movable, so you can either send a group of City Watch and Hunters out to find them, or throw monsters against your City Walls. It’s very rough at this stage, and we’ll be improving combat with each subsequent patch.

The Hunters are the first ranged unit to be added to sandbox, and as you might expect, we’ve gone the extra step and made sure the elevation of their arms matches the arc of fire. If you looked closely at the goblin archers on the Barbican in the old Tutorial, you may have noticed that even though they shoot down, their arms remain straight, which looks terrible and breaks immersion. In Sandbox, we’ve sorted that, and ranged units now adjust the angle of their bow arm, so when they are shooting down from elevated positions such as city walls, they look the part.

The Character Designer has now been updated with all the latest profession uniforms, and we’ve added in a couple of new hair and beard styles. Longer term we intend to support loading and saving of characters so you can play sandbox games with your favourite bunch of villagers, as well as sharing and downloading characters with the community.

Lighting has a new high quality setting for high-end PC’s that adds proper lighting to the night windows. It’s purely aesthetic but does add to immersion at the cost of some performance.

There’s no more ALT F4’ing or command-Q’ing to quit out of sandbox player, with the escape key now bringing up a quit to desktop option.

And finally one of the biggest changes is that we’ve swapped the default public version of the Windows build over to 64-bit. Most players are already using a 64-bit edition of Windows, and for those it brings the benefit of fewer memory related issues including moonwalking villagers after loading a Tutorial save game.

Players who find Folk Tale no longer works after Patch 0.2.6 are most likely on Windows 32-bit. Don’t worry, we’re still supporting a 32-bit build, but you need to opt-in to a special build under the Steam beta’s system. Instructions on how to do this can be found in the Announcements tab of the community section on Steam.

And that leads me nicely on to the next announcement we have today; the overhauled website. As development of Sandbox continues, we needed somewhere to provide all the information that players will soon start asking us for. What buildings are available? What function does each building have? What character professions are available? What loot items are available and what are their stats? We’ve set the foundations early so that we can continue to add meaningful content to the website, including Tutorials on how to use the Editors.

You’ll also find a development roadmap on the website. This is a high level overview of what features and content are coming in each patch.

In the next patch we’ll be introducing more of the economy, making resources more important, improving combat, and bringing more monsters to life.

I’d like to say a big thank you to the 875 play ers who completed the Player Satisfaction Survey. Your feedback has been important in helping us understand where we need to increase our efforts and make changes. Hopefully you’ll notice some of the changes resulting from your feedback, including the Production Status mini-blog where we look more closely at what’s in production, and a continuing drive to reduce patch times, down from once a month to around three weeks. Hopefully we can continue this and have the next patch out in the first half of July.

Your role as part of the community and your continued support during development is very important to us. We always try to listen to the voice of the community, and do our very best to respond to the feedback provided by taking actions that make a difference. Thanks for taking this journey with us.